March

 

It’s windy, stormy, rainy and then sunny. Super shining sunny. Then again you get snow and ice alert (?!) and the temperature drops.

 The other day I was going grocery shopping. It was ferociously windy and dark. I live at the very end of this little town and on the way to the supermarket I drive along the first fields, where the farmland begins and the view stretches out on the horizon. So I saw it clearly. In the sky an open and broken umbrella was flying in the wind.

It struck me because it immediately led me to my childhood, on the Italian Riviera, where I spent almost the first ten years of my life (I was about one year old when my parents moved there). We lived in San Remo first, then in Genoa. Very very windy. And it was there, with five, when I saw an old umbrella swirling in the wind. The only other  time it ever happened.

Now again, in a totally different choreography, I see an umbrella swirling in the wind. It gave me shivers of an intense pleasure. I felt myself swirling and spinning in the wind, together with the birds that now I was seeing flying and enjoying the wind. I felt a profound sense of liberation. And it was breathtaking. In my perception death is the very same: a liberation!

The weather keeps switching from quite cold, windy and rainy, to quite warm and sunny.  They opened the little park in front of my house. When the weather is nice, the children have returned and happily run around and play. The Arab women, again, meet here and sit together on the first bench right at the entrance. The bench I see better from my windows. The women talk a lot together, dressed mainly in black, although there is one who completely dresses in white. Perhaps she is mourning?